Snowstorm (Softly Falling remix)
Title: Snowstorm (Softly Falling remix)
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Summary: Everything looks different in the snow.
Rating: PG
Note: Remix of Snowstorm by theenginedriver for remixredux. Some dialogue is taken from the original.
Snowstorm (Softly Falling remix)
When Sirius passes a window on his way upstairs from dinner, he stops short, dropping his bag full of books to the floor with a thud; it's snowing. This is marvelous; the end of the long boring day suddenly has potential. There are snowballs to be thrown and snow forts to be built and snow to drop down the robes of people who will shriek. James shrieks just like a girl, Sirius thinks happily, and clatters back down the stairs and out the nearest door into a world of white.
He runs through the snow, already ankle deep and crunching under his feet, swirling in front of his face and clinging to his eyelashes. It's brilliant. The snow makes everything different, turning the muddy hillside that leads down to the lake to a smooth, glittering curve in the moonlight, frosting the trees with white. It's so tempting to turn into a dog and run barking through the snow, snapping at snowflakes. He snaps at the snowflakes anyway and catches a mouthful of wet snow and laughs.
He grabs up a handful of snow abruptly and whirls, ready to fling it in the face of the pursuers he's sure he hears, and then stops. No one is there. The only marks on the new snow are his own footprints. He frowns. They have gone up to bed and left him out here alone, and he feels suddenly bereft, aware for a moment of how childish he is being. The door he came out is still open, though, and he brightens when he sees Remus standing in the doorway, probably biding his time, planning a snowball ambush -- that's just like Remus, he plans things --
Then the door closes. Sirius tramps his way back through the snow and stands in front of the door for a while. Eventually he opens it, bracing himself against the probability of a handful of snow in the face. The corridor is empty, and when he goes upstairs dripping, his fingers prickling with the cold, Remus is sitting with James and Peter at a table far from the fire, shaking his head at their panic over tomorrow's Transfiguration essay.
Sirius watches for a moment, but he doesn't know what to say: did you know it's snowing? seems pointless, since he knows they know. Instead he goes up and sits on his bed and dashes off a few inches on Transfiguration that McGonagall will probably scribble all over in disapproving handwriting, and then flings himself back to stare at the ceiling. He is dripping on his bed, and he doesn't care. James and Peter have followed him upstairs and are sitting in the window talking about the snow, but it is too little and too late and anyway, where in the hell is Remus? What is so fascinating about Transfiguration, anyway?
They should be toasting marshmallows, and throwing marshmallows, and enchanting marshmallows to march across the stove to their doom, and he should be wrestling Remus to the floor and forcing toasted marshmallows between his lips while Remus sputters and protests that he doesn't like the burned ones. Remus should smell of burnt sugar by now and be sticky to the touch. Nothing like this is happening, although Peter and James are trying to decide how deep the snow is.
"Throw Wormtail out the window and see," Sirius says. He is cold and wet, and not in a good out-in-the-snow kind of way. He gets up and peels off his wet clothes and pulls on pajamas, scowling at the world. Peter has built the fire in the stove up high, and Sirius throws his socks on the top of it to dry, leading to a scuffle with James and Peter over whether it's fair to make the whole room smell like wet sock for his convenience. It makes Sirius feel a little better, but it ends when James dries the socks out with a flick of his wand, leaving them cool and smelling faintly of flowers rather than warm and smoky like wet clothes on a cold day should be.
"You'll make Lily a good little housewife someday," Sirius says, but James just turns pink and shuts himself behind his bed curtains rather than rising to the bait. James is making an absolute fool of himself about Lily Evans, Sirius thinks. It's pathetic. He climbs into his own bed and tries to sleep, but he is too restless. There's still the sense that things are not going right. They are missing hours they should be spending in the snow, and he cannot get those hours back. The fire crackles and snow rattles against the windowpanes and there is the sound of two people sleeping and he misses the sound of the third. Remus is keeping him awake, he thinks, and he should go down and give him a piece of his mind, since obviously he won't be able to sleep.
He wakes up in faint half-light that's says it's somewhere between the middle of the night and very early morning. It's absolutely silent. The snow is falling on snow, making great soft drifts. Remus's bed is empty, his pajamas still thrown across the foot of the bed where he left them the morning before.
Sirius slips out of bed, the stone floor cold under his feet. He wishes he knew where his bathrobe was, but if he rummages about for it, he will wake James and Peter, and suddenly he doesn't want a bunch of people awake yet, breaking the breathless quiet. He pads downstairs. The common room fire is burning low.
Remus is still at the table in the corner of the room, sound asleep with his head pillowed on his arms. His abandoned quill has bled a great splotch of ink across his parchment. His mouth is a little open, and his hair is all astray.
It's tempting to make a loud noise or put snow down Remus's shirt, but also, more strangely, to smooth his hair. It's like seeing a great dog asleep in front of the fireplace, Sirius tells himself. You just want to pet it. But Remus looks nothing like a dog; he looks tired and stiff, and with the faint shadow of stubble showing on his unshaved cheek, Sirius is suddenly very aware that he also looks nothing like a child.
It's all going wrong somehow, he thinks, and they are missing time they cannot get back.
"Hey, Remus," he says, and Remus jerks awake, a moment's alarm flickering across his face before he stretches too casually and turns to blink at Sirius. "You still working?"
Remus gives his parchment a weary look. "I think I've done all I can." There are dark circles under his eyes, and Sirius wishes he could wipe them away.
"You could skive off Divination and get some sleep," Sirius says.
"That's not a bad idea," Remus says, which Sirius finds a little alarming. Remus frowns at him. "When did you write your Transfiguration essay?"
That sounds more like Remus. "Last night in the dorm."
"It's been snowing all night," Remus says softly. "I wonder how long it will last."
Sirius stirs the cup of cold tea at Remus's elbow with his finger and pretends to peer at the tea leaves. "I predict that it will snow right up until it stops snowing," he says.
Remus rolls his eyes. "I marvel at your powers of Divination."
"I think my powers of Divination are good enough," Sirius says. "Come on, you need your beauty sleep. I have plans."
"Do I even want to know?" Remus asks, but he gets up and follows Sirius up the stairs. Sirius bumps into him on the staircase, both of them somehow awkward, and Remus pushes him off, gently but firmly. His hands are like ice.
"We're going to build a snow fort," Sirius says. "It'll be brilliant."
"You always say that," Remus says, but then they are at the door of the room and they have to be quiet. Remus doesn't seem to want to wake the others, either; he shuts the door quietly and kicks off his shoes without saying a word and follows Sirius over to Sirius's bed. After a moment's hesitation, Remus climbs up to sit on the foot of the bed, and Sirius climbs in after him and pulls the bed curtains shut.
They've sat like this before and played cards in the middle of the night and talked about their summers and planned elaborate pranks that usually went entertainingly wrong. Sirius wants to outline his plans for the fort, but somehow the words twist in his mouth into different words. "What happens after we leave school?" he says, almost a whisper.
"I don't know," Remus says, just as quietly.
"We fight, I guess," Sirius says. "Watch people fall down in the snow."
"We'll be all right."
He knows he should agree, but for a moment all Sirius can see is a world gone white and cold. "What if we're not? Nobody will ever know --"
"Ever know what?"
"Anything," Sirius says. "Anything that matters." He looks away, staring at his hands in the faint red light that is filtering through the curtains. "Don't let my family bury me," he says angrily. "I don't want them saying who I was."
"Padfoot, don't," Remus says, and so Sirius tries not to think about important things. He's good at that.
"You have to help me with the snow fort," he says, and Remus nods. They stretch out wordlessly on top of the blankets, with Sirius's feet buried in a fold of the blanket for warmth. Sirius pretends to sleep. It's easier now that he can hear Remus breathing.
There is the soft creak of James climbing out of bed and the clatter of him poking at the stove. Sirius doesn't hear him moving across the floor, but he knows when the light changes that James has pulled back the curtains a few inches to see if he is awake, and then when the light changes again that James has let them drop.
"Is Remus still downstairs?" Peter says blearily. "We should go prod him, or he'll miss class."
"Forget about it," James says, his voice a little odd.
"What's --"
"I said forget it," James says, more firmly, as if he's decided what he thinks about something. "Let them sleep."
There is a pause, and then the sound of Peter going out to the bathroom and shutting the door a little too hard. Sirius feels his face flush hot. James and Peter must think --
He looks down at Remus, who is asleep with his face half-buried in the pillow, as if trying to shut out the light, and it hits him like a handful of snow in the face that they are not wrong, at least not about him. He wants to touch Remus while he's sleeping, to bury his hands in the warm spaces around Remus's body and press his face against Remus's cheek. He wants to feel Remus's fingers slip under his cotton pajama trousers, cold against his skin.
He's pretty sure that defines queer and also queer for Moony. He suspects he already knew that, really; it's just another thing he's been good at not thinking about. It's fairly awful, he supposes, but there's some part of him that can't help thinking that it's good to have something else that his family will really hate. In a weird sort of way, it's also a relief. It reduces all his questions about the future to a single question, and at least it's a simple one.
He wants to shake Remus awake and ask him that question right now, but instead he makes himself get up very quietly so the bed doesn't creak. He tries not to look at James while he gets dressed so he won't see if James is avoiding looking at him. James talks brightly about snow. He is clearly trying to pretend he didn't see anything, and so Sirius pretends he doesn't know what James saw. That can't last forever, he knows, but denial is always good for buying time.
That afternoon the snow fort is magnificent; Peter carves wobbly crenellations on the walls while James and Lily try to work out how to charm the battlements so they will Transfigure snowballs on the fly. There's something about the way James and Lily are bending together over a snowball, heads together, flushed and snow-covered, that makes Sirius have that same sense that things are going wrong again; there's a hollow place in his chest that shouldn't be there.
He takes a step toward James, meaning to dump snow down his robes in hopes of recovering his attention, and then realizes that isn't really what he wants. "Off to gather reinforcements!" he calls, and thrashes his way through the snow toward the castle.
Remus is sprawled in an armchair in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room. He has a book open on his lap and is turning the pages restlessly fast. Sirius slides down to kneel in front of Remus's chair, and Remus looks up at him, startled. They're only inches apart.
"You have to come out," Sirius says. "There's all this snow, and you'll miss it." It's all he can think of to say. He puts his gloved hand over Remus's, and after a moment's pause Remus tangles their fingers together. For a minute both of them hold on very tight, not speaking.
"Of course I'll come with you," Remus says, and then they go outside together into the snow.
Pairing: Remus/Sirius
Summary: Everything looks different in the snow.
Rating: PG
Note: Remix of Snowstorm by theenginedriver for remixredux. Some dialogue is taken from the original.
Snowstorm (Softly Falling remix)
When Sirius passes a window on his way upstairs from dinner, he stops short, dropping his bag full of books to the floor with a thud; it's snowing. This is marvelous; the end of the long boring day suddenly has potential. There are snowballs to be thrown and snow forts to be built and snow to drop down the robes of people who will shriek. James shrieks just like a girl, Sirius thinks happily, and clatters back down the stairs and out the nearest door into a world of white.
He runs through the snow, already ankle deep and crunching under his feet, swirling in front of his face and clinging to his eyelashes. It's brilliant. The snow makes everything different, turning the muddy hillside that leads down to the lake to a smooth, glittering curve in the moonlight, frosting the trees with white. It's so tempting to turn into a dog and run barking through the snow, snapping at snowflakes. He snaps at the snowflakes anyway and catches a mouthful of wet snow and laughs.
He grabs up a handful of snow abruptly and whirls, ready to fling it in the face of the pursuers he's sure he hears, and then stops. No one is there. The only marks on the new snow are his own footprints. He frowns. They have gone up to bed and left him out here alone, and he feels suddenly bereft, aware for a moment of how childish he is being. The door he came out is still open, though, and he brightens when he sees Remus standing in the doorway, probably biding his time, planning a snowball ambush -- that's just like Remus, he plans things --
Then the door closes. Sirius tramps his way back through the snow and stands in front of the door for a while. Eventually he opens it, bracing himself against the probability of a handful of snow in the face. The corridor is empty, and when he goes upstairs dripping, his fingers prickling with the cold, Remus is sitting with James and Peter at a table far from the fire, shaking his head at their panic over tomorrow's Transfiguration essay.
Sirius watches for a moment, but he doesn't know what to say: did you know it's snowing? seems pointless, since he knows they know. Instead he goes up and sits on his bed and dashes off a few inches on Transfiguration that McGonagall will probably scribble all over in disapproving handwriting, and then flings himself back to stare at the ceiling. He is dripping on his bed, and he doesn't care. James and Peter have followed him upstairs and are sitting in the window talking about the snow, but it is too little and too late and anyway, where in the hell is Remus? What is so fascinating about Transfiguration, anyway?
They should be toasting marshmallows, and throwing marshmallows, and enchanting marshmallows to march across the stove to their doom, and he should be wrestling Remus to the floor and forcing toasted marshmallows between his lips while Remus sputters and protests that he doesn't like the burned ones. Remus should smell of burnt sugar by now and be sticky to the touch. Nothing like this is happening, although Peter and James are trying to decide how deep the snow is.
"Throw Wormtail out the window and see," Sirius says. He is cold and wet, and not in a good out-in-the-snow kind of way. He gets up and peels off his wet clothes and pulls on pajamas, scowling at the world. Peter has built the fire in the stove up high, and Sirius throws his socks on the top of it to dry, leading to a scuffle with James and Peter over whether it's fair to make the whole room smell like wet sock for his convenience. It makes Sirius feel a little better, but it ends when James dries the socks out with a flick of his wand, leaving them cool and smelling faintly of flowers rather than warm and smoky like wet clothes on a cold day should be.
"You'll make Lily a good little housewife someday," Sirius says, but James just turns pink and shuts himself behind his bed curtains rather than rising to the bait. James is making an absolute fool of himself about Lily Evans, Sirius thinks. It's pathetic. He climbs into his own bed and tries to sleep, but he is too restless. There's still the sense that things are not going right. They are missing hours they should be spending in the snow, and he cannot get those hours back. The fire crackles and snow rattles against the windowpanes and there is the sound of two people sleeping and he misses the sound of the third. Remus is keeping him awake, he thinks, and he should go down and give him a piece of his mind, since obviously he won't be able to sleep.
He wakes up in faint half-light that's says it's somewhere between the middle of the night and very early morning. It's absolutely silent. The snow is falling on snow, making great soft drifts. Remus's bed is empty, his pajamas still thrown across the foot of the bed where he left them the morning before.
Sirius slips out of bed, the stone floor cold under his feet. He wishes he knew where his bathrobe was, but if he rummages about for it, he will wake James and Peter, and suddenly he doesn't want a bunch of people awake yet, breaking the breathless quiet. He pads downstairs. The common room fire is burning low.
Remus is still at the table in the corner of the room, sound asleep with his head pillowed on his arms. His abandoned quill has bled a great splotch of ink across his parchment. His mouth is a little open, and his hair is all astray.
It's tempting to make a loud noise or put snow down Remus's shirt, but also, more strangely, to smooth his hair. It's like seeing a great dog asleep in front of the fireplace, Sirius tells himself. You just want to pet it. But Remus looks nothing like a dog; he looks tired and stiff, and with the faint shadow of stubble showing on his unshaved cheek, Sirius is suddenly very aware that he also looks nothing like a child.
It's all going wrong somehow, he thinks, and they are missing time they cannot get back.
"Hey, Remus," he says, and Remus jerks awake, a moment's alarm flickering across his face before he stretches too casually and turns to blink at Sirius. "You still working?"
Remus gives his parchment a weary look. "I think I've done all I can." There are dark circles under his eyes, and Sirius wishes he could wipe them away.
"You could skive off Divination and get some sleep," Sirius says.
"That's not a bad idea," Remus says, which Sirius finds a little alarming. Remus frowns at him. "When did you write your Transfiguration essay?"
That sounds more like Remus. "Last night in the dorm."
"It's been snowing all night," Remus says softly. "I wonder how long it will last."
Sirius stirs the cup of cold tea at Remus's elbow with his finger and pretends to peer at the tea leaves. "I predict that it will snow right up until it stops snowing," he says.
Remus rolls his eyes. "I marvel at your powers of Divination."
"I think my powers of Divination are good enough," Sirius says. "Come on, you need your beauty sleep. I have plans."
"Do I even want to know?" Remus asks, but he gets up and follows Sirius up the stairs. Sirius bumps into him on the staircase, both of them somehow awkward, and Remus pushes him off, gently but firmly. His hands are like ice.
"We're going to build a snow fort," Sirius says. "It'll be brilliant."
"You always say that," Remus says, but then they are at the door of the room and they have to be quiet. Remus doesn't seem to want to wake the others, either; he shuts the door quietly and kicks off his shoes without saying a word and follows Sirius over to Sirius's bed. After a moment's hesitation, Remus climbs up to sit on the foot of the bed, and Sirius climbs in after him and pulls the bed curtains shut.
They've sat like this before and played cards in the middle of the night and talked about their summers and planned elaborate pranks that usually went entertainingly wrong. Sirius wants to outline his plans for the fort, but somehow the words twist in his mouth into different words. "What happens after we leave school?" he says, almost a whisper.
"I don't know," Remus says, just as quietly.
"We fight, I guess," Sirius says. "Watch people fall down in the snow."
"We'll be all right."
He knows he should agree, but for a moment all Sirius can see is a world gone white and cold. "What if we're not? Nobody will ever know --"
"Ever know what?"
"Anything," Sirius says. "Anything that matters." He looks away, staring at his hands in the faint red light that is filtering through the curtains. "Don't let my family bury me," he says angrily. "I don't want them saying who I was."
"Padfoot, don't," Remus says, and so Sirius tries not to think about important things. He's good at that.
"You have to help me with the snow fort," he says, and Remus nods. They stretch out wordlessly on top of the blankets, with Sirius's feet buried in a fold of the blanket for warmth. Sirius pretends to sleep. It's easier now that he can hear Remus breathing.
There is the soft creak of James climbing out of bed and the clatter of him poking at the stove. Sirius doesn't hear him moving across the floor, but he knows when the light changes that James has pulled back the curtains a few inches to see if he is awake, and then when the light changes again that James has let them drop.
"Is Remus still downstairs?" Peter says blearily. "We should go prod him, or he'll miss class."
"Forget about it," James says, his voice a little odd.
"What's --"
"I said forget it," James says, more firmly, as if he's decided what he thinks about something. "Let them sleep."
There is a pause, and then the sound of Peter going out to the bathroom and shutting the door a little too hard. Sirius feels his face flush hot. James and Peter must think --
He looks down at Remus, who is asleep with his face half-buried in the pillow, as if trying to shut out the light, and it hits him like a handful of snow in the face that they are not wrong, at least not about him. He wants to touch Remus while he's sleeping, to bury his hands in the warm spaces around Remus's body and press his face against Remus's cheek. He wants to feel Remus's fingers slip under his cotton pajama trousers, cold against his skin.
He's pretty sure that defines queer and also queer for Moony. He suspects he already knew that, really; it's just another thing he's been good at not thinking about. It's fairly awful, he supposes, but there's some part of him that can't help thinking that it's good to have something else that his family will really hate. In a weird sort of way, it's also a relief. It reduces all his questions about the future to a single question, and at least it's a simple one.
He wants to shake Remus awake and ask him that question right now, but instead he makes himself get up very quietly so the bed doesn't creak. He tries not to look at James while he gets dressed so he won't see if James is avoiding looking at him. James talks brightly about snow. He is clearly trying to pretend he didn't see anything, and so Sirius pretends he doesn't know what James saw. That can't last forever, he knows, but denial is always good for buying time.
That afternoon the snow fort is magnificent; Peter carves wobbly crenellations on the walls while James and Lily try to work out how to charm the battlements so they will Transfigure snowballs on the fly. There's something about the way James and Lily are bending together over a snowball, heads together, flushed and snow-covered, that makes Sirius have that same sense that things are going wrong again; there's a hollow place in his chest that shouldn't be there.
He takes a step toward James, meaning to dump snow down his robes in hopes of recovering his attention, and then realizes that isn't really what he wants. "Off to gather reinforcements!" he calls, and thrashes his way through the snow toward the castle.
Remus is sprawled in an armchair in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room. He has a book open on his lap and is turning the pages restlessly fast. Sirius slides down to kneel in front of Remus's chair, and Remus looks up at him, startled. They're only inches apart.
"You have to come out," Sirius says. "There's all this snow, and you'll miss it." It's all he can think of to say. He puts his gloved hand over Remus's, and after a moment's pause Remus tangles their fingers together. For a minute both of them hold on very tight, not speaking.
"Of course I'll come with you," Remus says, and then they go outside together into the snow.